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Social entrepreneurs often make public appeals for funding to investors who are motivated by nonfinancial considerations. This emerging research context is an opportunity for researchers to expand the bounds of entrepreneurship theory. To do so, we require appropriate research tools. In this chapter, we show how computer-aided text analysis (CATA) can be applied to advance social entrepreneurship research. We demonstrate how CATA is well suited to analyze the public appeals for resources made by entrepreneurs, provide insight into the rationale of social lenders, and overcome challenges associated with traditional survey methods.

We illustrate the advantages of CATA by examining how charismatic language in 13,000 entrepreneurial narratives provided by entrepreneurs in developing countries influences funding speed from social lenders. CATA is used to assess the eight dimensions of charismatic rhetoric.

We find that four of the dimensions of charismatic rhetoric examined were important in predicting funding outcomes for entrepreneurs.

Data collection and sample size are important challenges facing social entrepreneurship research. This chapter demonstrates how CATA techniques can be used to collect valuable data and increase sample size. This chapter also examines how the rhetoric used by entrepreneurs impacts their fundraising efforts.

In the past decade, microfinance institutions (MFIs) have experienced a boom in innovations of lending products, partly fueled by donors who see microfinance as the next promise to alleviate poverty. Examples of these new products are the combination of credit with health or life insurance, business and health education, savings products, and the adoption of (or conversion to) individual loan liability. The add-on features generally aim at reducing the vulnerability of clients while contributing to asset creation, hence improving repayment rates and the sustainability of the service. The product innovations typically result from organizations striving to extend outreach, increase impact, and promote sustainability. As in other industries, MFIs typically decide whether to adopt new strategies based on other MFIs’ success with the innovations. Many new microlending products and approaches continue to be developed. However, MFIs must generally rely on qualitative and descriptive case studies and anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of these innovations to decide whether to implement the new strategies. The usual case study approach does not provide tangible evidence that can enable other organizations to know what changes can be expected if they were to adopt similar product changes.

Over the past two decades, institutions that make microloans to low-income borrowers in developing and transition economies have focused increasingly on making their lending operations financially sustainable by charging interest rates that are high enough to cover all their costs. They argue that doing so will best ensure the permanence and expansion of the services they provide. Sustainable (i.e., profitable) microfinance providers can continue to serve their clients without needing ongoing infusions of subsidies and can fund exponential growth of services for new clients by tapping commercial sources, including deposits from the public.

A growing body of research outlines how to best facilitate and ensure methodological rigor when using dictionary-based computerized text analyses (DBCTA) in organizational research. However, these best practices are currently scattered across several methodological and empirical manuscripts, making it difficult for scholars new to the technique to implement DBCTA in their own research. To better equip researchers looking to leverage this technique, this methodological report consolidates current best practices for applying DBCTA into a single, practical guide. In doing so, we provide direction regarding how to make key design decisions and identify valuable resources to help researchers from the beginning of the research process through final publication. Consequently, we advance DBCTA methods research by providing a one-stop reference for novices and experts alike concerning current best practices and available resources.

The purpose of the chapter is to engage with the relationship between the gift and the market in the context of philanthropic micro-lending. We seek to move beyond theorizing separate, ex-ante gift or market regimes and transactors who independently navigate between oppositional modes of transaction.

We turn to recent efforts of hybridizing charity and venture finance, exemplified by microfinance platforms such as Kiva.org. We combine data from an existing study of Kiva and its online community, with additional participant observation and third-party accounts detailing the evolution and workings of microfinance.

We illustrate how market-like elements are productively and problematically deployed in philanthropic giving and address the need to consider a broader range of socio-material relations involved in the framing of transactions.

A complex network of actors and (trans)actions needs to be assembled for the philanthropic loan to be enacted. We touch upon the making and role of the socio-material devices that actively participate in such enactment only tangentially. Further research is needed to flesh out the respective transaction complex, taking additional note of the work of borrowers, local loan officers, and other less visible actors.

Organizations need to recognize and creatively address the complex interplay of gift and market elements. They need to pay attention and take advantage of the tensions and synergies emergent in hybrid gift-market contexts.

We engage with a complex, less studied transaction context. The chapter shows that philanthropic gift relations can be reproduced through market-like elements and arrangements. Such production entails complex socio-material networks mobilizing a broad array of human and nonhuman actors.

This chapter considers viable and nonviable methods for corruption and ethics reform. Among the different types of methods considered are: vision and values based methods; win-win incentive and ethics networking methods; power-based top-down compliance and bottom-up whistle-blowing methods; alternative institution building methods; and, social movement methods. The chapter analyzes how the different types of methods can be more and less viable depending upon the specific multilevel situational factors related to micro individual, meso organizational, and macro institutional level, political-economic, and cultural obstacles to corruption and ethics reform.

Extant literature on entrepreneurship highlights the importance of the entrepreneurs' social network in mobilizing resources for their ventures. Over the last few years, entrepreneurial crowdfunding opportunities have become a subject of growing research interest as it acts as a tool to mobilize financial resources. However, many of these studies are limited within the scope of new ventures, creative industries, and commercial entrepreneurship. In this study, we examine crowdfunding within the context of social entrepreneurship in order to gain a deeper understanding of the motivation and the characteristics of the pool of individuals that contribute to social entrepreneurial crowdfunding. Data for this study have been collected from four cases of social entrepreneurial crowdfunding campaigns. The campaigners, who raised the funds in France for social ventures based in India, shared their knowledge of 157 individuals that contributed to their crowdfunding campaign. The findings inform that crowdfunders mainly originate from the crowdfunding campaigner's helper network, such as family, friends, and colleagues. A small percentage were also acquaintances and strangers. This network of individuals was motivated to support the campaigner achieve her/his goal or was attracted to the social cause that triggered them in creating a social impact. Moreover, the crowdfunders were generally open-minded and well-traveled individuals accustomed to participating in social and voluntary activities. Our study reveals that some members of the helper network are likely to disappoint by not supporting the crowdfunding campaign, thus emphasizing a twist to the existing literature on entrepreneurship. This has practical implications that prompt social entrepreneurs to exercise their social capital, networking skills, and communication strategies to attract and expand their community of helpers in order to trigger individuals from both their helper network as well as individuals outside their current network toward crowdfunding.